suppose that barack obama really wasn't a natural-born citizen? so what? constitutional obedience has a pernicious impact on our political culture. take the recent debate about gun control. none of my friends can believe it, but i happen to be skeptical of most forms of gun control. i understand though that's not everyone's view. and i'm eager to talk with people who disagree. but what happens when the issue gets constitutionalized? then we turn the question over to lawyers. and lawyers do with it what lawyers do. so instead of talking about whether gun control makes sense in our country, we talk about what people thought of it two centuries ago. worse yet, talking about gun control in terms of constitutional obligation needlessly raises the temperature of political discussion. instead of a question of a policy about which reasonable people can disagree it becomes a test of one's commitment to our foundational document and so to america itself. this is our country. we live in it. and we have a right to the kind of country we want. we would not allow the fr